-- Portfolio of the Padawan Data Scientist --

[www.PadawanDataScientist.com]

Zikri Bayraktar, Ph.D., CAPM

Welcome to my portfolio! Currently, I work as a senior research scientist at the Schlumberger-Doll Research Center in the field of computational electromagnetics, optimization and inversion.
Before that, I was an Advisory Engineer at the IBM SRDC (Semiconductor Research and Development Center) focusing on computational lithography modeling for IBM server microchips.
Since my background is in computational science and engineering, it was a natural extension for me to learn more about the data science and machine learning.
I will keep this page updated as I sharpen my data science and machine learning skills through formal education, MOOC courses and practical projects.
In addition to my graduate level course work in computational EM methods, I have also completed the Computational Science Ph.D. minor at Penn State, yet there is more to be learned and implemented.
My publications can be easily accessed through Google Scholar from the links provided at the top of the page.

I received my B.Sc. (Honors), M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering focusing on Computational Electromagnetics and Optimization from the Pennsylvania State University.
Along with my Ph.D., I completed a Ph.D. Minor in Computational Science. As part of my Computational Science Ph.D. minor
requirements, I took the following courses at Penn State University:

Optimization and Inversion
One of my passions is heuristic optimization methods. They are also called global optimization algorithms and some are nature-inspired optimization methods.
Genetic Algorithms (GA), Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), Clonal Selection Optimization Algorithm (Clonalg), and Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy (CMA-ES)
are few of the methods that I studied, utilized and published on.

I also invented and published a novel optimization algorithm called the Wind Driven Optimization (WDO), you can visit at this link to learn more about it. You can also find sample WDO codes written in Matlab, R, and TCL. Fortran and Python codes are in progress.

PROJECTS1. Amazon Web Services (AWS):
I took on learning what the AWS has to offer and experiment with each of the services
to become proficient at it. AWS offers a wide range of cloud computing tools and this will be quite exciting. Using the AWS Free
Usage Tier, we will try to experiment with AWS as much as I can.

IAM provides capability to define access groups and assign users to each group to control the access permission and what they can
do on the AWS. It is not recommended to login to your AWS console with the email address that you used to create the AWS account,
because it gives a root access to all services creating a security vulnerability. It is preferred that you define an
'Administrator' group, create Admin user and access your services through that user. One can follow the short AWS IAM video to
achieve this simple task.

S3 offers a simple storage capability for static files and I migrated this website, i.e. the
PadawanDataScientist.com to S3 for static website hosting. It is running from AWS S3 right now! Since I am already paying GoDaddy
for domain name hosting, I did not bother to make any changes to the DNS setup through Route 53. Maybe in the future.

Glacier offers long term storage that is not easily accessible. Note that the content stored in Glacier is frozen and stored,
and once access is requested it requires time to restore it. According to Amazon this might be 20min to 1 hour to de-freeze
your data and allow you access it. Then, there is only 24 hours to copy/download it. This is a good place to freeze your data
for long term storage like the external hard-drives.